“Hatred never ceases by hatred
But by love alone is healed.
This is an ancient and eternal law.”
-Buddha
“Hatred paralyzes life; love releases it. Hatred confuses life; love harmonizes it. Hatred darkens life; love illuminates it.”
-Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr
Now I know what you might be thinking. That this is yet another love post, telling us to forget the pain and suffering inherent in our lives, to forgive those who have wronged us and turn the other cheek, to choose love over hate. As if all we have to do is choose love, and then life will be great, blah blah blah, love love love, blah blah blah, then happiness. Sounds like an easy choice, right? Why don’t more people do that?
It’s complicated.
Suffering Happens
I have suffered a lot in my life. Every time that it seems like I’ve overcome the latest challenge, a new one rears its head. My dear friend of 25 years recently departed this earth far too early, a kind, brilliant soul who suffered in extreme ways during his 41 years on this planet. I know I could have been better at being there for him in his time of need. I wasn’t. And he is gone now.
I know he wouldn’t want me to suffer, thinking of his loss, thinking of the potential that maybe I could have been there to make a difference, to prevent his passing. But I suffer. I miss him terribly, and I haven’t even been able to fully grieve because thinking of his absence suffocates me. Tears flow uncontrollably, until I set aside thoughts of him, for now. I know it’s a process and it will take time. But I feel pain. I feel the pain of his mother. I feel the pain of those who he would have helped, had he had more time. I’ll write a blog about him in the next few months, and maybe that will help, but right now I’m just sad, frustrated, angry. In the midst of my pain, how am I supposed to “choose love?”
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I told a friend something recently that I had never admitted to anyone. Ever since my parents got divorced when I was little, I can cry on command. In the early days, all I had to do was think of the plight of the child of divorce, of jockeying parents, of uncertain love or support. As I grew older and learned more about others’ pain, I could cry at any moment simply by recalling the suffering. It only got easier when I learned about the animals we consume…the horrific, widespread, and callous torture inflicted on farmed animals was an easy way to evoke a cry; imagining chickens in tiny wire cages for their entire lives, or pigs stuffed into gestation crates, or fish doomed to swim in overstocked and disease-ridden tanks, no one to care for them, no one to stop the cruelty…if I concentrate on the image of any of these, I start crying.
As for why I never told anyone, I was always afraid that if I admitted it to people, then my future emotions wouldn’t be taken seriously. Oh, maybe he’s just faking it, they’d say. He can react that way anytime. It’s just a show.
But as I’ve reached the ripe yet still young age of 40, I’ve stopped giving a shit about how people will judge me. That’s out of my control. My Myers-Briggs is always either INFJ or INTJ; that means I feel things more than most people, and I over analyze more than most. Instead of being caught up in all the ways this makes me “abnormal” (whatever that means), I’ve come to see these attributes as my super powers. They are not things to be ashamed of; they are what make me special. I feel pain deeply, and it makes me cry. That’s the way things are. Which would be fine…if it didn’t make it seem even more impossible to choose love in the face of suffering.
Anger Leads To More Suffering
It took a long time for me to accept this emotional vulnerability. As a result, my life has been fraught with efforts to fit in, to please others, to do what I thought I was supposed to do. I am grateful that my path has been filled with lessons that now let me see clearly, but there have been many bumps along the way. The biggest bump of all has been my tendency to judge myself, to put all of the world’s problems on my shoulders…with a feeling that nothing I do is ever enough. In other words, I did not love myself. I chose self-loathing. I chose anger.
When I was a kid being mostly raised by a single parent, my ma did her best and I am forever thankful for her efforts at a time when she had so many challenges on her plate. One of her well-intentioned oft-repeated instructions were that we kids should be grateful we have food on the table and a roof over our heads. I can’t begin to estimate how often I heard this phrase. In a healthy, supportive environment, this advice probably wouldn’t have been taken where I took it, but as things were, I came to absorb this teaching as being a doctrine that we were spoiled little shits, and as I came to see the gravity of others’ problems around the world, I adopted a belief that I didn’t deserve consideration. I didn’t deserve love. I had so much when others had so little. How could I ever complain. How selfish.
My ma instructed with another teaching, asking us to consider each problem on a scale of 1 to 10. Again this guidance came from a place of good intentions, and there is some wisdom in it. However, when paired with my upbringing, being a child of a divorce and alone for much of my formative years, this led to me doubling down on hating myself. Man, all my problems are like 2’s or 3’s; I’m here whining about not going to a nicer school or not being able to find a date, and meanwhile a billion people go to bed hungry every night. Meanwhile some people don’t even have an icebox, or a stove, or a working toilet. People’s family members die in conflict zones every day. How the fuck can I complain. I should be better than this.
And then, of course, I’d get mad at myself, for not being able to cope better. Since, you know, things were so easy for me. I first got drunk at 14 years old, desperately trying to escape the mental anguish that I pointed at myself and others. It worked. Rinse and repeat. Insert additional unskillful coping strategies here, and pretty soon you don’t know how to cope without them.
I’ll save the drugs and alcohol discussion for a later date, but the point here is that I did not accept love as the answer. Love seemed like a fairy tale fluff. Buddhists looked like brainwashed automatons. How could they sit there and simply smile all the time, knowing how much pain and suffering is going on all around them? Heck I even came to despise them. How dare they relish in their fantasy world of love, while the rest of us suffer. How dare they sit there meditating, when the rest of us are working our asses off to directly help people/animals/planet. It_must_be_nice.
All this anger and guilt led to a career focused on reducing as much suffering as possible. Which led to me focusing on animals—first companion animals, then animals used for research, then wild animals, then farmed animals…always trying to up my game, to help as many living beings as possible. I didn’t give a shit if you were a rat or a chicken or a pig or a donkey, it was so blatantly obvious that animals suffered just like us. And since there are so many more nonhuman animals than humans, and since there are less laws to protect them—with literally tens of billions tortured every minute of their existence every single year—it was an easy choice to focus on them.
Even this path has been fraught with anger, with judgment, with suffering. Anger at all aspects of the meat industry. Anger at the consumers who keep paying for products that came from tortured animals. Hell I even had anger at my fellow activists for not doing enough, or for doing something I viewed as unlikely to reduce suffering.
It wasn’t until I started meditating again and studied mindfulness more extensively that I began to see the harm that I caused through my views—harm not just to me, not just to my fellow advocates, not just to the farmers who were caught in this web of exploitation…but to the animals themselves. I started seeing how anger begat anger. Every time we make a choice, we reinforce our tendency to react that way in the future. Little things matter. My mental condition was deteriorating past a point of no return, my mind ablaze with judgments and frustration and anger, all while pushing my body with an insatiable desire to do more good. To make up for all the advantages I had in life. To support equity and equality. To give what I had until I had nothing left to give.
It was not sustainable.
Nothing is Personal, Permanent, Or Perfect
We all learn things in different ways, but nothing beats experience. So I came to realize that I could sit here and complain about all that came before, lament that the world wasn’t kinder to each other, and be mad at everyone and myself all the time. Or, I could work to change my relationship to the world, and to myself. As I committed to the latter, and started actively incorporating that worldview into my work and relationships, all of the sudden I started seeing things clearly. And I started finding teachers left and right to help instruct me on how to choose love over hate, love over fear, love over anger.
I recently had the fortune of attending an MLK meditation retreat at Insight Meditation Society, led by Ruth King and Devin Berry. Before I comment on my experience I simply have to plug Ruth’s book, Mindful of Race. For many years, I have been strong supportive of DEI initiatives, of racial equality, equity, and representation. But as a white cis male my understanding can only be surface level. Like no other book I’ve read to date, Mindful of Race helped me better understand the daily—not just daily, I should say moment to moment—challenges and baggage that people of the global majority experience in a nation founded on the principles of white supremacy. It was a transformative book for me and I can’t recommend it enough to anyone who seeks to better understand the issues of race in the United States.
During the retreat, Devin told a story about how his grandfather would interact with children of the neighborhood by letting them write questions in a notebook that he would then address and discuss with them at a future time. Devin shared an excerpt from one of his grandfather’s responses. His note talked about how, when he died, he would die knowing that he lived a life of service, which is a good life to have lived. But, he would also die knowing that he could have loved more. That he could have forgave more. That he could have done more.
There is some sage wisdom in this story, in that it is helpful for us to reflect on our efforts over time, to consider what we have done, and how we might act more skillfully or helpfully in the future. But me, with my history and brain chemistry, felt some dismay at this story. It felt like a continuation of the life view that I was trying so hard to shed, the idea that whatever I do is not good enough. That I could have done more, but that I was selfish or weak. How was I to conflate these viewpoints?
Fortunately, no one raised their hand to ask a question at the end of the talk for a good ten seconds, which is just about the time that I need in order to raise my hand—both because I don’t want to take away the opportunity for someone else to ask what might be a more urgent question, and because I need time to quell the butterflies in my stomach before doing any form of public speaking. So, I asked them to help me understand how to think about these conflicting viewpoints.
Shocking no one, Ruth had a brilliant response, which I’ll do my best to paraphrase here. She told me to—ok, actually I think it’s important to acknowledge that first, she said she loved the question, and then she gave me a smile and look of love that honestly warms my heart just to think about, before proceeding with her response—consider the course of history. Consider all the wars, all the problems that have been faced, just for us to arrive where we are today. She said consider where we are with civil rights—obviously very far to go, but look how far we have come over the last hundred years. It’s all a process. Seeds are continually being planted, and they may or may not bear fruit in this lifetime. There’s no need to judge ourselves for the past or for not being good enough; we’re constantly learning, seeds are constantly being planted, and we’re growing into who we are in this very moment. We wouldn’t be where we are without the successes and the failures. Remember that everything exists as a result of the causes and conditions that came before, and that this life is that of a stream, full of ebbs and flows with moments that are smooth or rough, always moving, always changing.
Yep, you guessed it…the tears, they did flow.
As if that wasn’t enough, she nailed it home with the inscription she left on my copy of her book, which contained my favorite phrase from the book—”Remember, in a real sense, nothing is personal, permanent, or perfect.” I purposely didn’t look at what she wrote until later that day at the airport, wanting to save it or something, I don’t know. But when I opened the book to see what she wrote, while sitting next to my new friend Amy whom I met at the retreat, I felt a shudder run through my body. No one is perfect. I don’t have to take things personally. And nothing is permanent.
Everything Has Made You Who You Are
One thing I continue to learn as I age is that we’ve all been through the shit. We all have hard times. Every job I’ve worked, people think that they are working harder than everyone else in most other jobs. We have this tendency to think the world revolves around us, that our experience is unique. It is unique in a way, but it is shared by everyone in another. We have far more in common than we tend to realize.
The first noble truth in Buddhism basically states that life has suffering. Things happen to us. We age. We fall ill. Friends and family die. Those things are unavoidable. But what is within our control is how we relate to the unavoidable bits of suffering. Are we going to react to hate with hate? Or are we going to counter with love? Love for others, love for all life, love for ourselves. We must choose love.
I know it’s not always easy, and I know that some “noble truth” from 2600 years ago might sound like wishful thinking. So, to bring us back to the modern day, I want to share some passages from Arnold’s latest book, Be Useful.
Arnold Schwartzeneggar. Whatever you think of his movies or politics, it’s hard not to respect how much he has done with his life. He had a lot of challenges growing up. A lot. But he has managed to conquer them one after another, and now he embarks on his latest path, working to create positivity and providing life advice for millions of people. And, as crazy as it might sound coming from The Terminator, he wants to put more love out in the world.
There’s a lot to take from Be Useful. In fact, there’s so much good stuff in there that I am simply going to quote a few passages below directly. In plain and simple words, he succinctly explains how we’re all in this together, how each moment is an opportunity for learning, and for giving love.
- Even if you never had a positive influence in your life, even if everyone you’ve ever run into was an obstacle or an enemy or they did nothing but hurt you—they have all still taught you something. That you’re a survivor. That you’re better than that, better than them. They showed you what not to do and who not to be. You are here today, right now, reading this book, trying to better yourself, because of the people in your life—for better and for worse.
- Even with undeniably bad things, I choose to remember they were a big part of what drove me to escape, to achieve, to become the person I am today. If my childhood was just a little bit better, you might not be holding this book right now. And if it were a little bit worse, you might not be holding it either, because I could have fallen down the same rabbit hole of alcoholism that my brother fell down, which eventually cost him his life in a drunk-driving accident in 1971.
- I wouldn’t be who I am today without each one of those experiences. The Stoics have a term for this: Amor Fati. Love of fate. ‘Do not seek for things to happen the way you want them to. Rather, wish that what happens, happens the way it happens. Then you will be happy.’ (Epictetus)
- It all starts by catching yourself any time you start to complain, then talking yourself into switching gears and looking for the good in things. If you can choose joy over jealousy, happiness over hate, love over resentment, positivity over negativity, then you have the tools to make the best of any situation, even one that feels like failure.
So here we have Arnold Schwartzeneggar of all people telling us to choose love. These are wise words. He probably doesn’t realize it but he’s echoing the words of the Buddha here, who said that we should be grateful for our enemies, for they teach us patience that we would otherwise not have the opportunity to develop. How’s that for a new way of looking at things? Good news, we don’t even have to hate our enemies! We can learn and grow stronger from all of our experiences, and we can love them for the growth that we undergo as a result. In this way, our enemies are actually our friends.
Be An Extremist…For Love
I am almost indescribably sad about my dear friend’s recent death. There is a great deal of pain present, in a complex knot of “could I have” “I should have” “the world is so cruel and unfair” and simple thoughts of “why.” But digging deeper, I know what to do. My friend and I both struggled with addiction, and we had probably hundreds of conversations about it over the years. He knew I wanted to stay sober more than anything. I am sober now, but it is still a relatively new development for me, and it is likely a fragile state until I develop a stronger and longer foundation in clean living. Knowing that my friend would want what’s best for me, his passing strengthens my choice to be sober. Whatever form he exists in now, he is out there, and in me, giving me strength. That I started crying when I wrote this last sentence…he meant a great deal to me…only makes me want to carry out his wishes even more. He opened my eyes on many other social justice issues and I will not let my education on them dwindle in his absence. He will live on in me and in all those he touched.
Yes, we need to do things for ourselves, but as I’ve written before, sometimes we lean on others for motivation. I know my friend suffered terribly in life. All he wanted was love, a love he never quite succeeded in being able to direct toward himself. And I saw the damage that caused, because it’s always clearer to see the damage when it’s happening to others, when it’s not a complicated and messy self-assessment. And so I continue my work on loving myself for who I am in this moment, not resenting the me of the past or wishing for the me of the future. And I continue fighting for those who are left behind, who need it most. And I do it all with love, not hate. Love really, truly, is the only answer.
I’ll end this post with a passage from Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. As most know, he was a powerful purveyor of love in countless ways. The idea of being “an extremist” is one that many will react to with negativity, but as you’ll see, it’s not a bad thing in and of itself. Join me in being extremists for love, and together we’ll bring that arc of history closer toward justice and compassion for all.
“But as I continued to think about the matter, I gradually gained a bit of satisfaction from being considered an extremist.
Was not Jesus an extremist in love? ‘Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, pray for them that despitefully use you.’
Was not Amos an extremist for justice? ‘Let justice roll down like waters and righteousness like a mighty stream.’
Was not Paul an extremist for the gospel of Jesus Christ? ‘I bear in my body the marks of the Lord Jesus.’
Was not Martin Luther an extremist? ‘Here I stand; I can do no other so help me God.’
Was not John Bunyan an extremist? ‘I will stay in jail to the end of my days before I make a mockery of my conscience.’
Was not Abraham Lincoln an extremist? ‘This nation cannot survive half slave and half free.’
Was not Thomas Jefferson an extremist? ‘We hold these truths to be self–evident, that all men are created equal.’
So the question is not whether we will be extremist, but what kind of extremists we will be. Will we be extremists for hate, or will we be extremists for love? Will we be extremists for the preservation of injustice, or will we be extremists for the cause of justice?”
-Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr
Choose love, my friends. Always love.